A New Focus on Infants and Toddlers

Scientific findings on the need to stimulate babies’ brains spur charities to step up efforts

Over the next three months, 25 million boxes of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies will appear on grocery-store shelves bearing messages devised by Zero to Three, a Washington charity that hopes that the publicity will help make more parents aware of the importance of a child’s first three years of life.

Parents as Teachers, a St. Louis non-profit group, is using a $750,000 grant from the Charles A. Dana Foundation to work with a team of neuroscientists from Washington University to translate important scientific information about brain development in babies into a form that parents can understand.

A $10-million public-education campaign led by Rob Reiner, the film director and actor, and financed by a group of foundations and corporations, aims to teach the general public about the lasting impact of babies’ first experiences.

Those projects are part of a new wave of philanthropic efforts to focus on infants and toddlers. Many of the projects seek to build on or incorporate what has been learned from programs that were developed over the last several years by a handful of foundations and charities.

Many of the new projects are drawing on research that has found that a child’s experiences in the first three years have a deep and lasting effect on how the brain develops and functions.

High-tech scanning tools have shown that specialized nerve cells in the brain form connections with each other as babies start to experience the world around them. If those connections are not reinforced through such activities as reading and talking, they are eventually eliminated, permanently affecting how the brain processes information and learns.

The research has made questions about how to nurture children so that they will become productive adults compelling to the foundation world, as well as to business leaders and policy makers.

“We’ve tended to talk about children using warm, nurturing language,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a non-profit group that is helping cities and towns nationwide put together programs in early-childhood development. “A lot of policy makers and business leaders are men, and those words make them squirmy.

“But suddenly we’re talking about hard wiring. Science has developed a way to measure what’s going on in little people’s heads, and so now we have new and important audiences who understand the urgency of early childhood.”

New federal legislation that requires millions of welfare recipients to find jobs — and thus place their kids in child care — has added to that urgency, especially in light of the brain research, say Ms. Galinsky and other experts. The quality of child care is especially dismal in poor neighborhoods, experts say, making it difficult for people moving off welfare to find child-care situations in which their babies can receive the intensive care they need to develop emotionally and socially.

Such concerns have prompted local, state, and federal governments, as well as many businesses, to join charities and child-development experts to improve child care. Fresh evidence of government’s interest came last week in President Clinton’s budget proposal for 1999, which seeks $21.4-billion in subsidies and tax breaks for child-care programs.

But many in the non-profit world now fear that their success in getting government’s attention could have a serious drawback: Some foundations could decide to withdraw their support for programs to nurture youngsters now that governments and businesses have grown more interested in the cause.

“Once an issue arrives on the public agenda, it becomes more difficult for foundations to sustain their role and their interest in an area,” says Michael Levine, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York who heads the foundation’s early-childhood-development program, which has spent more than $30-million since 1990.

Carnegie is part of a coalition of 16 foundations and 22 corporations that has been working to keep philanthropy interested in early-childhood issues. The coalition, called the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, has financed $11.8-million in programs and research over the past five years to improve the quality of child care.

Proponents of early-childhood programs say they worry not only about the continued availability of foundation money but also about whether some of the money now awarded by foundations is being squandered on efforts that might not be effective.

“There certainly is cause for concern,” says Matthew E. Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. “There are lots of different initiatives, and there are different approaches, and some may be less effective than others.”

Mr. Melmed says he is particularly worried by the proliferation of programs that rely on professionals’ telling parents how to raise their children, rather than giving parents the skills and tools to recognize their children’s needs and respond appropriately.

In an effort to make sure that parents are properly equipped, Zero to Three, which used to exist primarily so that professionals in child development could share scholarly information, is now focusing on parents.

“Parents don’t so much need to have someone tell them a stock answer as to why their baby is doing something,” says Mr. Melmed. “They need to learn how to read and relate to their baby, and to let their baby tell them what he needs.”

Some leaders see the proliferation of programs, and the professional attention, as a good sign.

“The need is huge,” says Deanna Gomby, deputy director of the Center for the Future of Children, which oversees early-childhood programs at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Packard has poured $30-million into such efforts so far this decade. Ms. Gomby adds: “It isn’t a bad thing if community after community decides that they want to focus on their kids.”

The popularity of child-development issues has helped to expand such respected programs as Success By 6, a United Way program that works to insure that children receive proper care and nurturing from the prenatal period until they start school.

Success By 6 was started by the United Way of the Minneapolis Area in 1989 and now operates in more than 200 metropolitan areas.

Although Success By 6 programs vary according to local needs, many work to organize volunteers — particularly corporate leaders involved with United Way — to lobby for policies that help children.

Lisa Silverman Pickard of Boston’s Success By 6, says that business executives who work with the program have turned up at the offices of state lawmakers and at legislative hearings to speak in behalf of young children.

The group, in collaboration with a coalition of children’s advocates, was instrumental in getting legislation passed that insures nearly universal health care for children in Massachusetts. It also helped persuade the legislature to approve a new automobile license plate carrying the logo “Invest in Children,” the proceeds of which go toward improving child-care services in the state. The license plate is expected to raise $2-million in 1998, Ms. Pickard says.

Many non-profit leaders credit the Carnegie Corporation with shining a spotlight on the needs of babies and young children.

In 1994, Carnegie issued a report titled “Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children,” which focused on brain development and children’s experiences in the first three years.

The report included statistics showing that many parents were working more and spending less time with their children. It also cautioned that child care for infants and toddlers can be expensive, is often of poor quality, and is poorly regulated.

“There’s no way to underestimate that report in terms of the wave of momentum it touched off,” says Ms. Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute.

As a follow-up to the report, Carnegie began a new $5-million grants program in 1996, also called Starting Points, in an effort to get states and cities to devote more attention to children’s earliest years.

The program, which operates in 10 states and 6 cities and plans to expand over the next three years, generally works to enhance already-existing private and government-sponsored programs, Mr. Levine says. It is administered by local groups.

The Starting Points program is not without critics. Patrick Reilly, editor of Foundation Watch, a monthly newsletter published by the Capital Research Center, says the program relies too heavily on government participation and on collaborations with groups that work closely with government agencies.

“They’re essentially forming very broad coalitions of organizations whose very first reaction is to turn to government support to solve problems,” Mr. Reilly says. “It would be much more effective if this money was spent on private solutions, such as empowering parents to work better with their children, and empowering corporations to find ways to be more flexible in helping parents.”

Mr. Levine says that the Starting Points program does encourage private solutions but that the problems facing young kids are too great for charities, businesses, and other private organizations to tackle without government help.

Shortly after Starting Points began, the Commonwealth Fund created Healthy Steps, a nation al matching-grants program that provides more thorough pediatric care for children from birth to age 3. Health-care professionals monitor not only the child’s physical health but also his or her emotional and behavioral development.

The foundation has spent $6-million on the program, which operates at 15 sites and is expanding. Local funds, many of them community foundations, have brought the total investment to $20-million.

“We’re reinventing pediatrics for the 21st century,” says Kathryn Taaffe Young, an assistant vice-president at Commonwealth, who heads Healthy Steps.

Adds Linda Sobeck-Scratch, a registered nurse at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit who participates in the program, “It’s my job to help parents understand what their baby is capable of at various stages of development, and what they’re capable of as parents.”

The popularity of such programs as Healthy Steps, Starting Points, and Success By 6 has had an added benefit — helping to raise the profile of organizations that have for years been working in behalf of babies and young children, and helping them to deliver their messages better.

Zero to Three, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1997, made a major commitment two years ago to focus on the concerns of parents, not just child-development experts.

“We had a wealth of knowledge that was not getting communicated to parents,” Mr. Melmed says.

Among other things, Zero to Three has tried to make academic papers more accessible by putting scholarly findings into easy-to-read form. And it is attracting corporate support. In addition to creating the new partnership with Kellogg, the group is working with Johnson & Johnson to find ways to equip health-care professionals with materials on child development that can be passed along to parents. Johnson & Johnson also sponsored Zero to Three’s 20th-anniversary celebration and is financing a campaign to publicize the group’s message.

In St. Louis, Parents as Teachers has been working since 1981 to educate parents about the importance of the early years. Child-care specialists are trained to visit new parents at home, to teach them about their babies’ development, and to get them involved in activities that enhance their children’s learning.

Mildred Winter, the executive director, says the group, which has expanded nationally and internationally, hopes to use the brain research as its latest tool to educate parents.

The grant from the Dana Foundation has enabled the charity to team up with five neuroscientists who will help it incorporate information about babies’ developing brains into its home-visitation program.

“It’s scientific affirmation of what we’ve been saying all along,” Ms. Winter says.

A growing number of regional foundations have also turned their attention to early-childhood development.

The Rochester Area Community Foundation decided to focus on the issue in 1988 after learning from the local school district that 33 per cent of the city’s students had to repeat kindergarten because of learning problems. A study commissioned by the foundation also found that the poorest neighborhoods lacked child-care options and that the quality of child-care programs in general was poor.

Several grant makers, as well as charities, city and county governments, and businesses, banded together to form the Rochester-Monroe County Early Childhood Development Initiative to search for solutions to the problems.

Area employers were encouraged to “adopt” day-care centers and to help them improve their standards by underwriting capital improvements and by paying for training for staff members.

Over the last seven years, the number of day-care centers in the city that have been accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a national group that sets volun tary child-care standards, has increased from 3 to 47.

The United Way of Greater Rochester has pumped more than $4-million a year into its Success By 6 program to help prepare young children for school.

The city school district expanded its preschool program, and Robert Wegman, the owner of a grocery-store chain and a local philanthropist, donated $3-million to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester to create an education program for toddlers and preschool children. Over the past five years, the percentage of children in the city attending preschools has risen from 57 to 83 per cent.

Meanwhile, says Jennifer Leonard, president of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, the percentage of children who need to repeat kindergarten has dropped to 26 per cent.

“Clearly, what we’re all doing has had a positive impact on the readiness of our children for school,” Ms. Leonard says. The foundation is now sponsoring a separate study to investigate the impact of different approaches to early-childhood education on children’s success in school.

Still, Ms. Leonard says, she is concerned about how long her foundation and others will remain committed to early-childhood development and care.

“It’s tempting in the foundation world to jump from subject to subject, especially where raising our visibility to donors is a key issue,” she says. “We’ve had board members who have said we should move on from early-childhood education because we’ve done our thing.”

But she adds: “What I’ve discovered is that we’re in a long-term business, and change takes years of careful investment. Now is not the time to stop.”